Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is about managing several aspects of a customer relationship – from the time customers have expressed a willingness to engage right through to the time they sign up and beyond.
A customer may need to interact with several people within the company and ensuring a smooth experience is part of the journey. There could be a team assigned to a customer and keeping track of how the deal is progressing is essential.
The sales process could stretch over months and identifying the points at which follow-ups should happen and evaluating progress is part of CRM functionality. Sales teams are primary to the effort – but other departments need to be involved as well, so that lean phases of lead nurturing, information sharing and negotiations are pursued to successful closure.
Is your company website the most authoritative, detailed and well-documented source of information about your product range available on the internet? Does your website pass that test, or do customers get the information they need from your competitors or other sites?
Once the company website meets this gold standard, marketing, sales and service departments can work in tandem. HubSpot unifies the effort to attract, sign on and retain customers.
When customers can find everything they need to make a decision on the company website, conversions happen. Detailed product information and explanations should be provided to potential customers in an easy to understand format in text, visuals, video or audio – whatever medium customers prefer. About 50-70% of the sales process gets underway with this set of interactions.
The job then is more about getting customers to visit the site and serve information they are looking for – which is where marketing operates. And when customer information is available right from the early stages through to conversion, services can help retain customers long-term. The more information that is available about the customer journey, the better it can be leveraged in the future.
Apart from making powerful and multi-functional websites easy to build, HubSpot can transform it into your marketing HQ. Think of any digital marketing initiative planned – paid search, SEO, lead generation, landing pages, email marketing, newsletter distribution, social media management, social mentions, competitor analysis – every single one can be scheduled, automated and managed from your website and the response tracked back.
The advantage is that all these channels can be tracked individually or as a whole. So you get the complete picture and the parts you would like to pay more attention to. Marketing campaigns have a singular objective – to inform and attract prospects. What could be better than consolidating it all at one place?
In addition, Hubspot lets you control every aspect of the marketing mix. Need to try out several promises and benefits on landing pages and see what works best? Design and deploy the pages and HubSpot will automatically start routing visitors to the best-performing landing page. That helps to save marketing dollars with fresh insights.
The more insights, the better the marketing works. HubSpot dashboards help you understand every aspect of the sales and marketing effort. How long it takes to recruit and sign up customers.
It evaluates the competition and tells you where you need to improve both – content and the features that need to be built. It involves digging in a little deeper but seeing how the competition attracts traffic gives you clues on what options to pursue.
Content is the magnet that builds long-term value. There’s no escaping this fundamental truth. When customers find content they trust on the website and when it helps them improve their own business, the sign-ups accelerate. The Cost of Acquisition comes down over time – and as long as customers continue to derive value, they will not shift.
In addition to your highly driven sales team, HubSpot is the star player who never stops working or delivering. It requires time and effort to set up – but after that, the return on investment can be in multiples of the investment.
Understanding customers is the key to building market share. And customers aren’t created equal. Some of them could become the gateways to expanding the business and targeting new markets in future.
HubSpot is built on the premise that CRM has to be integrated through the sales, marketing and service teams within the company. Only then will you begin to derive benefits that are simply not possible when they operate in silos. A customer could begin the relationship with sales and marketing but over time, they interact with several departments within – and that experience has to be captured and analysed to keep delivering value.
Talk to our consultants on how a HubSpot implementation can work, starting with the CRM and then deployed right across the company to truly manage sales, marketing, services and customer relationships